Random Writings

heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access (hUMA)

AMD’s heterogeneous Uniform Memory Access (hUMA) is now becoming next-gen way of CPU’s and GPU’s accessing system memory. Some of benefits of hUMA are:

With hUMA, the CPU and GPU share a single memory space. The GPU can directly access CPU memory addresses, allowing it to both read and write data that the CPU is also reading and writing.

GPU in a hUMA system use the CPU’s addresses, it can also use the CPU’s demand-paged virtual memory

Ensure CPU and GPU caches both see an up-to-date view of data.

developers will get MegaTexture-like functionality built-in for GPU.

What is more interesting is that, PlayStation 4 lead architect Mark Cerny said that both CPU and GPU have full access to all the system’s memory, strongly suggesting that it is indeed an HSA system. Can’t wait for that.